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Fusion Plasma Plant in The Future
NightWulf writes "The BBC reports that Europe and Japan are currently looking to host a new JET power plant. This new plant creates plasma, which is akin to creating a star on Earth. Interesting to note that 1kg of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000kg of fossil fuels."
Wow, I had no idea fusion power was so far along.
It would be the first fusion device to produce thermal energy at the level of conventional electricity-producing power stations, and would pave the way for commercial power production.
This is awsome. Expensive for the amount of power though. Anything that can reduce our dependency on oil, deserves some research in my eyes.
Of course, fusion is better than fission in this regard, but the same arguments hold in either case.
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50-100 years is way better than tens of thousands of years, as with fission waste. That won't outlast the containers it's in.
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Why was this modded Funny? It's the truth. A fusion reaction is hard to keep going, and if just about anything goes wrong, the reaction will die. Somebody detonates a bomb next to the reactor? Fine, so the thing gets jolted. The worst that could happen is that the reaction is disrupted slightly---and it stops. There is not much excess reactivity in a fusion reactor. Just because something uses a process used in bombs doesn't mean it is a bomb. Gunpowder contains sulfur; does this mean that rotten eggs are an explosion just waiting to happen?
and the only radio activity is the Neutron bombarded walls of the chamber which dissipate quickly enough to not be a big problem
What do you think happens to the Neutron bombarded materials? (Hint: They can become radioactive.) Fusion produces a tremendously strong neutron flux. So strong, that very few materials survive being near the process. Obviously, your choice in containment materials can make all the difference in HOW radioactive we're talking.
Personally, I don't think we'll quite get the hang of fusion inside Earth's gravity well. Once in space, we can allow the Fusion to bleed off its neutron flux like the Sun does. Thus it might be very useful for space-based power generation and propulsion. But here on Earth, fission is a much more viable energy source. Our biggest problem is that most of the reactor designs are from the 50's and 60's, when we were just starting to understand nuclear power. With hindsight firmly in place, plus ~500 commercial reactors, a hundred or so military reactors, and a few hundred research reactors currently in service, we have the knowledge and technology to create very safe reactor designs. Hell, just removing the 19th century boiler design out of the equation makes something like Chernobyl impossible.
The real problem right now is government fear over terrorism. The U.S. government forces plants to keep potentially useful materials sitting in pools of water or buried in the ground instead of being used in commercial ventures. Some of that stuff can be reprocessed into nuclear fuel, and some of it has uses in medical, electronic, and aerospace fields. None of it is useful to "terrorists" until it's reprocessed into fissionable fuel. (Don't get me started on the uselessness of a dirty bomb.)
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One of the problems with previous attempts to build a fusion reactor is that they couldn't keep it running for more than a few seconds. The holy grail of fusion physics is to build a reactor that can maintain a sustained reaction; and, does so without requiring more energy input than the amount of energy produced in the reaction.
It's an OO thing. The attraction of moving to electric or hydrogen-cell cars isn't so much that these are more environmentally friendly *right now* as that it provides a potential for a vast environmental-friendliness advantage because it decouples the method of energy production from energy use.
Yeah, at the moment this electricity or hydrogen would be probably just generated using fossil fuels. But the catch is it doesn't *have* to be. You could substitute a nuclear power plant for that coal-burning one and the electric cars would continue to run just the same... it makes productive change much easier. Whereas if you buy a gasoline-based automobile, it's going to be running on burned fossil fuels forever*.
* Unless you are Doc Brown and you do some retrofitting.
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Yes - but only just and only in small volumes and for a short time - the glow in the balls is the plasma recombining. Those plasmas are created in small volumes at room temperature by stripping the odd electron of a heavy molecule using electric fields. The plasmas for fusion are at millions of degrees, well above the point where thermal effects knock the electrons off. Comparing these with a fusion reactor is like comparing the forost on your car on a cold morning with the Antarctic Ice cap. Sure, they are bot ice - but that is about all they have in common.
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I think you are way off base. Fusion power would not end energy companies. I doubt it would even end fossile fuel exploitation. Oil gives more bang for the buck then any other fuel source which is why we are so addicted to the damned stuff. Bonus points for the fact that it is cheap and easy to make an engine that will run on it.
Now, fusion offers a great deal of possibilities, but there are two very large problems with it even when it is 'worked out'. First, it will be expensive. It is a major task to build such a plants. Building enough to power the world would take many decades and cost far more then I imagine most nations would be willing to spend. I am not saying that it couldn't eventually be done, but don't expect it to happen over night. Further, even if the world was covered in fusion plants, that energy would not be free. You still need to pay for all the parts and labor it takes to keep such a plant going. Sure, you might cut costs on material expenses, but they would rise everywhere else. Electricty wouldn't suddenly become cheap, just abundent. Second, fusion is large. You can't throw a fusion engine in your car and electric motors just don't have the capacity of a gas engine. If electricity was free tomorrow we still wouldn't hav electric cars.
I doubt energy companies are cowering at the prospects of fusion. Even if fusion was to completely upset the need for oil and coal, there is still the fact that people need energy and in a nation like the US that energy is going to be brought by a corportation. An energy company is in a perfect position to fill that need. At worst it means they have to shift their bussiness to focus less on oil and coal and move to fussion. The world won't end for them.
The plasma does not constantly bump into the walls of the container. As some previous posters have touched on, if the plasma touches the walls of the vessel it loses so much of its power that the reaction dies.
Another problem is that if the current in the plasma passes through the walls of the vessel it creates a magnetic field around them which kicks against the plasma's own magnetic field with incredible force. This is called a disruption, and it kills the plasma. Back in the project's infancy a particularly bad disruption actually caused the entire torus to jump a clear centimetre off the floor. If that doesn't sound impressive then you need to have another look at a picture of the torus!
I had the privlidge of working at JET during the third year of my degree*, and I can say that JET has some of the coolest gear and cleverest people working there that I have ever seen.
For anyone who's wondering about the computing equipment they use: they have a lot of big Sun servers which host X sessions from Linux PCs or some Xterminal like things called Igels (they also still use some original X Terminals.. I don't know if those are still in production?) on which most development is done. They use Linux in as many places as they can, including a ~80 node analysis cluster (JET produces data at a rate of about a gigabyte a day during operations). Windows PCs are available for desktop use by those who prefer them.
* If anyone thinks my very basic description of the physics is a sign of BS, I should point out that I was there as a Software Engineering student, not a physicist.
Correction, we are addicted to oil until such point that is becomes uneconomical to do so. At which point, it would probably be natural gas for a few years until we realize we hadn't built enough refineries for that either. And the fission people will be saying, if you had only built any plants in the last 30 years... but noone will listen. The whole time, there will be thousands of other people pointing at all the resources buried in the ground and off the coasts, untouchable due to self-imposed regulations.
By then, I wouldn't be surprised if we switch back to coal, given the advances in plant designs over the last 30 years. That's a fuel that the eastern US has an overabundance of, yet is frowned upon by the environmentalist lobby because of the tendancy of existing plants to just vent the waste products into the atmosphere. Good thing the DoE is already working on it. It's amazing what the free markets can provide, when you let them work...
Getting the materials are not the main operating cost. Creating extreme pressure and temperature is the expensive part. EFDA is the group that is putting this together. The best yeilds that they have gotten with their current tokamak reactor (JET) are about 60%, and this is for very short time periods. They are confident that ITER will be able to opperate for long periods of time and will break even on energy use. They hope to produce up to 10x as much energy as is input. Determining the appropriate amount of scepticism is left as an exercise for the reader :)
Actually, you have it backwards on fission. Fission is also an unstable reaction; the difference is the following:
Fusion reactions occur at an energetic peak. Basically, for fusion, we're trying to balance a ball on top of a hill. If we lose our balance, the ball rolls down the hill and the energy production ceases.
By contrast, fission reactors operate at an energetic low (this is simplifying, but true for illustrative purposes.) We're trying to stay in the bottom of a valley, while the reaction tries to force us to climb up the walls. If we lose our balance, the reaction can shoot up a wall and then you get meltdown.
notes on this: fission reactors can be designed to be negative coefficient, such that an increase in output leads to a cycle that will decrease output, but the reaction itself is still positive coefficient.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
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I think the correct plea is please, please, please, nobody tell the environmentalists about it.
This has the word nuclear in it. The nuclear boogieman will derail this a lot faster than anything else.
For example, the correct term for and MRI is Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging. The nuclear here has nothing to do with nuclear power, it just means that the magnets make the nuclei of the atoms move in certain ways and that the images are created by iterpreting those movements. The Nuclear part was dropped because people were worried about radiation.
It really won't matter to the fanatic environmentalist how safe this is, it has the word nuclear in it, and thus is to be fought.
Currently, the DOE has so many clean up sites, not because the nuclear energy projects were not successful and profitable, but the fact that the DOE is required, COME WHAT MAY, to take care of any finality issue with a nuclear based energy company. So the companies have a whopping zero cost for failure or liability, and remember, we're talking nuclear.
So, when they think their operating costs get too high, or they just don't want to do it anymore, the nuclear companies can literally drop what they are doing right there, walk out, and it is all a Department of Energy (DOE) problem from then on. Guess what? DAMN NEAR EVERY ONE OF THEM DOES. That is their little perk. This stuff is too dangerous without permanent government supervision. The US doesn't want some weird Iranian group that they don't trust buying up their workplace (because if anyone is going to sell something to Iranians we don't trust, by god, it should be bought direct from the US government), and after all, businessmen don't care what they have to do as long as they get the cash for doing it. So, as a protection, they have no responsibility for their nuclear actions.
"We leaked some sludge? WHOOPS. That's it, it is now too expensive with the lawyers. Close shop. Call the DOE. It is their child now. Thanks for the BILLIONS, and see ya later, suckers!"
The best analogy would be that the government would now be responsible for auto manufacturing recalls. "Sorry we made some bad cars. Call the government, it is their problem now."
Except:
1: Fossil fuels aren't necessarily fossil. It's possible that oil is produced in a way that doesn't involve life. Abiogenic theory might turn out to be correct after all. Remember how in the 1960s everyone believed "the oil is going to run out in forty years"?
2: We're not choking as much as you think.
3: There were despots in the middle east before the Oil Age began.
4: If TMI was (if you will excuse the pun) blown out of all proportion, what about Chernobyl?
I agree that the anti-nuclear lobby can be mischevious, but that's one of the aspects of lobbies. At the other extreme, arguing that if we embraced nuclear power then we would be living in paradise is also well, I mean, hello?, look at France. They have totally bought into nuclear power and they still can't come up with a good pop song or a decent car.